Pagans and Neopagans, Part Four - Starting Now, Really This Time.

By now you are asking "But what exactly is this information that you are telling us we have to be uncertain about?  We think we can handle it now.  We won't tell the children we know for sure.  We promise."

On Standing With Stones, the joke is always that when archaeologists don't know what something is, they suggest it might be a temple.  But it could have been multiuse.  Avebury could easily have been for observing blood sports. One said "They could dig up Wembley Stadium years from now and declare it a religious site." "Are you saying Wembley's not a religious site, then?"  If unexplained, then ritual.

Brythonic religion- if you read carefully, you see "Wal, it musta been like what we found almost a thousand years later in welsh and celtic sites, but in strict point o' fact we don't actually know anything.  Modern neopagans love, love, love gods and goddesses, but animism may have been more of the reality. It does seem that societies trend from animism to polytheism... but some don't - and it may also mean that it flows the other way. We fall back into animism without a religious authority structure. Lewis thought societies fell back into pantheism when they no longer believed in old gods, and saw that in 19th C romanticism. Shamanism, gods or spirits inhabiting individuals, is also part of the package, hence berserkers further north, and other Indo-Europeans dressing up as wolves before battle. (See Lewis's Merlin in That Hideous Strength and Charles Williams thinking of coinherence as being authentically Brit as well as Christian compatible.) Modern Christians regard the gifts of the Holy Spirit as the final expression of that sort of thinking. But...but...but...not really any evidence for shamanism right there in the Anglo-Saxon centuries. Divination is likely, but also not clearly attested and hard to ascertain how it fits.

Earth mother and Sky-father deities occurred from earliest known years among the Indo-Europeans, and it is entirely likely that the A-S deities fit that. But entirely likely is not is. Looking for place-names is a way of tracking down possible gods, but even if they include deity, supernatural, or worship/ritual elements they could be mere persistence of the name, and misunderstood.  Names hang on a long time. New tribes come in and repronounce them according to their own sounds, and sometimes squeeze it into words they already have. We are pretty sure that some of the Weyland Smith place names indicate he was a big deal in that era. 

Yep, pretty sure...Dark Ages. Ing looks likely, maybe related to Yngvi.  

Tiw, Frigg, and Thunor are days-of-the-week gods, and thus very likely. No Loki, though.

There were two Wodens, a god that looks clearly related to Odin, but another that is an ancestor of ruling houses of some tribes. Is the second one a downgraded version after Christianisation, or separate and derived from another word or figure?  We can't tell. One of them did make it to being Wednesday!

We have places where we think things happened, because there are animal bones and ash suggestive of sacrifice, and occasional bits of jewelry, and we find grave goods, which is not as unambiguous a sign of pre-Christian and pagan practice as we once thought, but it's something.  Apparently the custom of abandoning grave goods was already coming in even before the Christians were.  Ah, fashion.  As the archaeologist CJ Arnold said about the whole batch of them "However, no unambiguous archaeological evidence currently supports the interpretation of these sites as places of cultic practice." Well they have to be somewhere, don't they? Not always. If your people are big on sacred groves, and trees, and wells, and big rocks, then you might not build much. And some of your ritual practice might be highly portable, like idols.

Part of the difficulty is their illiteracy. This makes it nearly all guesswork.  Names especially can blend, or turn out to come from other places. Just because it looks similar is bad etymology. We are unlikely to find new texts, but archaeology will almost certainly improve our knowledge...as it did over 50y/a when over 150 Romano-Germanic votive inscriptions to the matronae Austriahenae, a triad of goddesses, were discovered near Morken-Harff, Germany. You will notice that this is close to where the Frisians and especially the Franks were. Before that, people had concluded that Bede the Venerable didn't know what he was talking about with these pagan deities, because he didn't leave the monastery and only got his info second-hand. Also, he was writing decades after even the late dates. (Why a monk would make up extra goddesses for people to think about when he was trying to stamp them out did not seem to bother the scholars that much.) But then the inscriptions are found in 1958 and his description of Rheda month-festival (*Hrêðe),  and Ēostre month-festival, and Mother's night on what is now Christmas Eve (March, April, and December festivals) suddenly look like they could be the real deal. Tolkien clearly thought so. In his appendices the third month of the Shire calendar is called Rethe. Attested only by Bede as Anglo-Saxon, the name Eostre, though of a people not a deity, is found in Old High German and other west germanic dialects, and is the possible origin of the word Easter. It may be related to the Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn.  Heck, it almost definitely was, because it sounds really similar, and there were lots of other fertility goddesses of very similar name... Just not anything that actually nails that down.